GREAT ARCHITECTURE AND BUDGETS REVISITED. Rebecca Koffman quotes the defense Michael Graves gave to complaints that the ceilings in the Portland Building are too low: “The floor to ceiling height is low because of the budget, not the architect.” She points out the building cost about $51 per square foot—“a cut-rate budget for a commercial building at the time”.
In 2008 I posted here about “GREAT ARCHITECTURE AND BUDGETS” and said: “People who live in and look at architecture do not usually allow for the cost constraints the architect faced.”
In that earlier post I referred to the story I had heard that when Walter Gropius designed the Harvard Graduate Center, he was the only major architect who would accept the budget limits, and that no allowance was made for post war inflation so that he had to cut corners to complete the project.
I see that the link in the earlier post doesn’t work. Here is a link to the wikipedia article on the Harvard Graduate Center, where I spent a large part of my life, and here is a link to a Google images page which shows the many parts of the complex.
